Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“Well, I’ll watch out for moose and bears and Socialists. Anything else?”

Her mother touched her fingers to her lips, kissed them, and reached out to touch her daughter’s lips.

Mimi made an exaggerated kissy sound, and then Grier withdrew her hand.

“Phone!” she said, wagging her finger at the lens. She left, looking at her watch as she marched sharply to the corner, where she hailed a cab. One stopped immediately.

Cramer fast-forwarded through scenery and strangers in roadside diners and gas stations until he came to a close-up of Mimi’s own face fringed in dark pixie hair and with her impossibly blue eyes. Cramer’s heart rate speeded up.

“News update,” she said. “This is Mimi Shapiro reporting from Nowhere!” She swiveled the camera around to take in the countryside.

“Not a Starbucks in sight,” she said, returning the camera to her face. But for a second the lens took in her cleavage, too.

His arms went limp and he lowered them to his lap. He closed the viewer, resisting the urge to look at her again. He closed his strong hands around the camera. It was red, a JVC HDD, with thirty gigabytes of drive. Laser-touch panel operation. He could guess what it was worth, a thousand bucks or so, and yet so small he could completely conceal it in his grip.

So many toys, he thought.

He took a deep breath. Closed his eyes tight. If only he’d had this camera when she had changed by the car. If he closed his eyes, he could see her, almost entirely naked, the cheeks of her butt paler than her tanned legs.

This changed things.

What happened now?

He would be patient. Patience was his greatest gift. He had read something about that in his mother’s book The Artist’s Path. “Above all else, be patient with yourself. The overzealous boater swamps his craft.”

Cramer had felt the author was talking directly to him with that quote. But he knew she wasn’t talking about canoes. He understood what she meant, all right.

Calmer now, he stared toward where the house on the snye stood, though he could not see it from here, anymore than they could see him. He tugged on his one gold earring. Tugged until it hurt.

He wondered what they were up to in there. Was she a new girlfriend?

He took a long deep breath.

The wind picked up again and rocked him. From the look of what she had in the car, Mimi was planning on more than an overnight visit. So she was going to be around for a while. The thought made Cramer’s blood buzz in his veins.

Jay and Mimi stared at each other for one very long uncomprehending moment, standing in the middle of his bedroom by the gaping hole in the floor.

“Marc Soto, the artist,” she said.

“Right.”

Then Jay led her back to the kitchen to sit down.

“I feel numb,” said Mimi. “Catatonic.”

“Catatonia is characterized by rigidity of the muscles,” said Jay. “You’re as wobbly as Jell-O.”

She stared at him. “I’m impressed,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not only anal; I’m a doctor’s son.”

They sat for long moments at the table not quite able to look straight at each other. Embarrassed-at least he was. He had been entertaining thoughts about her, for Christ’s sake! Thoughts that now made him cringe, but only sort of. And that made it worse. Then a desperate idea occurred to him.

“Your birth father?” he said.

She nodded, frowning, as if she wished it weren’t true. Then she looked down again, suddenly demure, though that seemed the last word he would ever use to describe her.

Then finally their eyes snagged, and he tried to say what neither of them had been actually able to articulate yet.

“So you’re like… We’re… I’m your…”

She laughed. “Nice try, Shakespeare,” she said.

They looked hard at each other-looking for themselves in each other’s faces. That was what he was doing, anyway, and assumed she was doing the same.“You’ve got Marc’s forehead,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Trust me.”

“I’ve never laid eyes on the man,” he said.

“Not even photographs?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. When I was a kid. He left before I was born.” The answer seemed inadequate to him, as if he should have cared more.

She was staring at his face again, her eyes taking him in with an intimacy that made him a little breathless. “You’ve got the line of his jaw, too,” she added. “Or what it used to be like. Now his face has gone all kind of spongy.”

Jay felt his jaw with his hand, realized how tightly clenched it was.

“Are you okay?”

She sounded so solicitous. And after a moment he was able to say yes, which was ridiculous, really, under the circumstances. Then his mind wandered back to the hidey-hole, and he must have glanced in the direction of the bedroom, because she stood up and reached for his hand again. He didn’t take it this time.

Jay dropped down into the earthen room. The floor was compacted soil, as were the walls. The tunnel was only a meter high and only a couple of meters long. He crawled along it to another trapdoor. How could he not have seen the trapdoor outside? But when he pushed it up and open, he found himself directly behind the shed in a dense thicket of prickly ash, which shielded the doorway. Ducking his head, making himself as small as possible, he crawled through the thicket out to the scruffy patch of long grass and the wall of undergrowth and scrubby cedar that pressed up against the shed. He never came back here.

Mimi followed on her knees. She swore colorfully. He helped her up, pulled away a thorny twig tangled in her hair. She stared at him, her expression unguarded. His gaze slipped away. Her eyes were ultramarine, so vivid that he wondered if she was wearing special contacts.

Closed, the storm door looked like a stained and filthy piece of plywood left to rot, propped up against the back wall of the house, deep in a winterkill of leaves. Nothing more. In the shadow of the house, it was hardly visible.

Jay shuddered. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked out into the sunlight. He walked halfway down the lawn to the snye, then stopped. There was a bit of wind out there in the open. He realized he had been holding his breath and let it out now.

Mimi followed him silently. It seemed she was out of things to say. Who could blame her? There was far too much to say to know where to start. She wandered past him down toward the snye. He didn’t follow, just watched her, as if she were some exotic animal that might bolt if he moved.

Mimi… Mimi… Where had he heard that name before? Ah, right: the waif in Puccini’s La Boheme. Mimi was no waif. She was thin, but only in the right places-not in any danger of wasting away. He allowed himself a good long look. His sister.

His cell phone rang.

He dug it out of his pocket, looked at the name on the screen. “Hi, Jo,” he said.

Mimi leaned against a tree, down near the water’s edge.

“Jackson, I have purchased the most wonderful salmon,” came the voice on the phone.

“Uh… okay,” said Jay hesitantly.

“Are you all right?”

No, he thought. Not even close! But he was not going to talk about this over the phone, not even to his mother’s partner. “I’m fine, Jo,” he said.

She paused for just a fraction of a second, seeing through him, no doubt. “Well, you will be more than fine when you see this fish. And that’s why I’m phoning.”

“You’re phoning about a fish?”

“Uh-huh,” said Jo. “I was hoping I could interest you in making your famous coriander-and-lemon-zest rub.”

“Uh… I don’t know.”

“Don’t say you’re too busy. It’s Friday night, for goodness’ sake.”